Reviews

Are You Ready? is an interesting visual document of Thin Lizzy during what is one of the lowest periods of their original run. While the band was still a good live act and a decent draw, by the time they released their Chinatown album in 1981 there were many cracks in the machine that spurred the band on. Filmed live in Loreley, Germany by WDR for their Rockpalast program, one of the coolest live music programs on the planet, this nineteen song set is good but not great.

It took nineteen years but, in the opening guitar slashes of “Dark Horse,” listeners can almost hear the bandmembers collectively growl and then proceed to smash everyone listening over the head with thirteen of the strongest tracks this band has ever recorded; none of which fall into easy classification because Converge plays them all their own way, by their own rules.

So, when he learned his totally awesome dad was going to take him to see Alestorm, Sam took the initiative to make a sign saluting one of his favourite bands. Said sign read: “Alestorm is fucking awesome!” Honestly, I had nothing to do with its creation.

Kevin Stewart-Panko reviews the recent Toronto performance on this year’s traveling Heathenfest 2009 tour, which included Eluveitie, Belphegor, Vreid and, his son Sam’s favourite band, Alestorm. Sam was so excited he joined the Hellbound crew for the show, all of which is chronicled within.

If you want to hear passionate music played by dedicated musicians that have been reworked and reworked again and again into perfection (some of the tracks go back as far as 95), the final results are proof that this will be one of my absolute faves of 09 and possibly one of the greatest melodic doom metal albums of our time.

For this album, thirteen musicians weren’t just handed a single song and asked to artfully adorn it with electronics, they were handed as much source material from The Melvins’ songbook as they wanted and asked to get as creative as they wanted in creating something new from their source material selections; essentially being asked to create a series of sound collages from any and as much Melvins material as they liked.

By night’s end it was clear that the Harpo’s Halloween crowd had been treated to one of the strongest performances from Type O Negative in recent memory. What else other than perfection could one expect from a band whose set featured multiple songs about Halloween and fucking vampires?

Prior To The Fire sounds much more like Priestess does in a live setting, with songs like the sprawling “The Gem” showing them unafraid to stretch past the seven-minute mark while still retaining a strong pop hook in its chorus.

For Kunsten Maa Vi Evig Vike is very much a product of its time, but it is a product that is not discoloured by the bitter taste of symphonic black metal’s subsequent indulgences. What Kvist brings to the table is quite simple: balance.